Dynamic linking

Simon 'corecode' Schubert corecode at fs.ei.tum.de
Sun Nov 30 15:00:45 PST 2003


Lately Michel Talon told:

> Those who follow freebsd-current know that there has been an epic
> thread about the slowness of dynamic linking in FreeBSD, in which John
> Dyson and Matt Dillon sent some posts. I have been told by an OpenBSD
> developer that they have introduced a cache of the position of the
> dynamic libraries, and that this modification alone was sufficient to
> improve considerably the startup time of KDE.

I've already considered this when doing prelinking. Like an in-memory
prelink. I don't know about this cache specifically, but non-root
generated caches have a security problem. The system needs to guarrantee
uncompromized cache data when a) first caching data and b) retrieving
data from the cache.
This means the cache data and access either needs to be managed somehow
by a) root or b) kernel. IMO with a secure authenticated messaging
system as DragonFly will be using, this will be much less of a problem
than with FreeBSD.

Also, I'd like to work on this area if/when we agree to implement such a
thing.

cheers
  simon

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